


Complications of the Flesh

by Steals_Thyme (Liodain)



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Talking, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-30
Updated: 2010-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:24:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uh. Dan and Ror talk, and it rains, and... yeah, that's it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Complications of the Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://kink-bingo.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**kink_bingo**](http://kink-bingo.dreamwidth.org/), (totally wasted) prompt is 'virginity/celibacy''. Poor Hand verse.

"I was starting to think you weren't interested," Dan says, perched on the roof of Rorschach's tenement block, socked feet dangling. Eight stories beneath them, the city thrashes and claws, tearing itself to shreds like it does every night, whether they're out there or not. He can't care right now, not with a heady mix of endorphins and relief bubbling through him, skin cooling in the evening air. "I didn't know what the hell was going on."

Rorschach grunts. His shoulder is a warm point of pressure against Dan's, and his knees are drawn up, bare feet resting on the ledge and dirty with grit. Spring rain mists around them and settles in his hair, weighing the burnt-orange curls against his forehead. He is a gargoyle in a badly-buttoned shirt.

He's also lost in some thought or another, expression set in a vague frown. It's dark up here; the neighborhood's strobing neon is dispersed until it's just low-level ambiance, grainy and polluted against the night sky. Soft light doesn't really flatter Rorschach's rough-set face, but, mask aside, nothing really does.

Dan nudges him until his scowl deepens. That suits him better than the pensiveness.

"Complicated," he says.

"No shit." Dan grins at him. "When is it not?"

Rorschach coughs out something that would be a laugh if there was an inch of humor in it, and returns to his thoughts, that hundred-yard stare fixed somewhere beyond the dilapidated building opposite. His default state may be grim and bitter, but Dan knows him, can tell when something is really bothering him, and after the past few weeks he can't let it go the way he used to.

"You okay?" Dan leans against him lightly, companionably, then moves away again. He learned reassurance via body language long before they got this mixed up, trusts Rorschach's tripwire defenses to register him as non-threatening. "What's on your mind?"

Rorschach shakes his head, presses thin lips into an impassive line. "A lot of things."

"Not all bad, right?" Dan says, and then bites his stupid tongue.

Rorschach maintains a silence that's a breath away from being icy.

Dan takes off his glasses to rub at his eyes. He's feeling tired now that the adrenaline is ebbing away, slipping him back into his skin as reality is begins to weigh in. They have slept together before, sure, but only in the most literal sense, curled together in Rorschach's narrow cot. Dan's aware that for all the intensity of their... thing, until tonight, all it had really amounted to was a handful unsure kisses, some inept fumbling and a whole lot of freaking out.

There seems to be a different kind of freaking out going on now, something low-level and tightly screwed down, and it is a little ominous. Rorschach won't look at him.

"So, uh." The rain is getting heavier, seeping through Dan's clothes. It hisses down around them, staticky noise under the traffic passing below, the wet tires squealing on blacktop. "Why are we up here, again?"

Rorschach becomes unnaturally still. When he speaks, he places his words in careful monotone. "Room smells like sex. Don't like it."

"Ah." Dan wonders if he smells of sex, too. Rorschach sure as hell does: sweaty, tangy warmth under cold rainwater. "Listen," he says. "Why don't you come back to mine, stay the night. It's Friday; you don't have to work tomorrow, right?"

"Ehhn..."

"I mean, take the guest room if you want, and—"

"Daniel."

"—the shower, there's plenty of hot water, and it's—" Dan takes a breath and just gets it out, because his insecurity is now well and truly loose and on the rampage. "Okay, be straight with me. Are you—was I that bad?"

(It had been as messy and rough as he had expected; a tangle of limbs and clothes and his hands had been shaking so badly he'd been unable to keep a rhythm. It hadn't seemed to matter in the heat of it, but the bruises will show tomorrow and maybe it did matter really, even though it had made him pant and thrash, maybe—)

"Be straight with you," Rorschach echoes.

Dan snorts back a wildly inappropriate laugh. "You know what I mean."

Rorschach is quiet again, and Dan thinks he's just going to ignore the question. Then his face twists briefly, he strains out a breath and says, "Not always about you, Daniel."

"Sorry," Dan says, knee-jerk, then grimaces. God damn it. Dan ties himself in knots to accommodate Rorschach's running tally of neuroses, and still he makes him feel like a self-absorbed asshole with a handful of words.

He takes off his glasses, shakes off the moisture beaded on the lenses and waits for the resentment to subside.

"So, talk to me."

"We are talking."

"Right." Dan hunches his shoulders to fend off the steady patter of rain, huffs out a short laugh like it's a release-valve. "You're hard work, you know that?"

Rorschach just shrugs and shifts his feet against the roof ledge.

Everything here is gray and subdued, muted by the dark sky and Rorschach's strange mood, and there's something restless about it all. Mournful like a string of winter Sundays. Dan tips his face to the clouds and waits, lets himself wallow for a while, sighing deeply and steadily enough for it to be like breathing.

"No frame of reference," Rorschach eventually says.

"Hm?" Dan furrows his brow, tries to pick up the lost and fraying threads of their conversation. "What?"

"Can't answer your question. Nothing to... compare, or contrast. Hard to reconcile with second-hand experience, hehn. Complicated."

Oh.

_Oh_.

Rorschach has always put so much weight on virtue and integrity, on being morally upstanding—and has been nothing but wary of the physicality of these things—but to think that he'd _never_... not with anyone?

What it must have represented to him, in the midst the savage violence they deal with on a nightly basis, so often brutally sexual—

And he'd just, with Dan, without even—

It stirs a host of feelings that make Dan a little queasy. Lust, predictable and demanding. An ache that might be pity or compassion, not that Rorschach would appreciate either. An ugly little voice that thinks they're both kind of pathetic. Morbid fascination, because the man is in his early thirties at a generous guess, and—Jesus, there's the lust again.

Dan's hands feel hot. He reaches out to cup the back of Rorschach's neck, and Rorschach finally stops staring into the middle distance and looks at him. He is haggard and pinched with some emotion that's wrong for his face, and Dan realizes he's been choking on it this whole time.

"Don't make something of it." He shrugs Dan's hand away. His body language usually ranges from 'don't touch me' to '_don't touch me_', and right now he's prickling, a thousand defense mechanisms sprung. "It's of no consequence."

"Sure it's not, that's why you're huddled up here, soaked to the bone and winning a staring competition with the building over the street."

The muscles in Rorschach's jaw tighten, and all Dan can think of is how his stubble had cut against the soft skin of his inner arm, how his teeth had clenched, the way he'd tried to pull Dan against him and push him away all at once.

"You regret it?" Dan says suddenly, and he's not even sure where that's come from, just that it seems obvious and important.

"No." It's sharp and immediate, but he seems to notice that he's wound himself tight enough to snap, and softens, just barely. "No regrets. Have long since realized, physical purity is poor way to judge integrity. Just another bargaining chip, small value to be exploited for all it's worth, before it's inevitably spent."

"Wow, that's, uh." Dan pauses while he tries to think of a diplomatic response. "I think you just reached new heights of cynicism, buddy."

"Not my fault you can't see it," Rorschach says. "Conditioned by society to put it on pedestal, regard it as something to be protected, conflate it with innocence. Truth is this: can be chaste and still be rotten to the core, still riddled with lust, filthy and... and _degenerate_, overwhelmed by urges without ever enduring another's touch."

His hands tighten their grip around his knees, white-knuckled under yellow and black bruises.

"Far from innocent, Daniel. Not with thoughts like that. Not with—" He cuts off, huffing through his teeth. "Made own bed, long time ago. Finally laid in it."

"Oh," Dan says. Just oh, because that was a pretty bad pun, and also because meeting Rorschach's screwy concepts of sexuality head-on never works out too well, and he's got the bruises to prove it. He stands, makes a cursory effort to brush down his sodden pants. "Well, to be honest, innocence is in no way part of your appeal."

"Heh."

"And neither is your habit of brooding in the rain. Come on, man." Dan offers him a hand up.

Rorschach looks up at him, face as blank as any darkened window. "Didn't ask you to stay out here," he grumbles, but he clasps Dan's wrist and lets himself be hauled to his feet, balanced for a heartbeat on the brink of the roof.

Dan's other hand comes up instinctively, grabs his elbow to draw him away from the edge and tugs him closer before he can disengage. He wraps an arm around him and tightens it until his face is pressed to Dan's shoulder. It's pretty passive as far as hugs go; Rorschach keeps his hands lax at his sides, sighs in what's probably moderate-to-strained tolerance, then pushes himself free with as much dignity as he can muster.

He's a bedraggled mess, rain dripping off the angles of his face, shirt untucked and cuffs unbuttoned. Dan knows a certain amount of the affection he has for this man stems from some misguided urge to take care of him, whether he needs it or not—usually not—and that's something he should examine, but hell. He's just so wretched sometimes.

"Come back with me," Dan says. "Coffee, shower. Get warm and dry."

Rorschach makes an ambivalent noise.

"Or we could stay up here and, oh, I dunno, _talk_ some more..."

Rorschach lowers himself down over the side of the building, catches a handhold on the fire escape, a foothold on his window sill. "Extortion," he mutters, far too petulantly to mean it.

"Stay?" Dan asks, and tries not to load the question with expectation. "Please?"

Rorschach pauses, caught a hundred feet up, hanging on by his fingernails.


End file.
